Flash Archives

BELL’S POND by Nathan Willis

October 10, 2019 · Fiction

Derby didn’t get out on his own. I took him. Yes, technically he was yours, but he liked me better and you didn’t take very good care of him. At least not as good as I did. Before you go waving this letter in front of the cops, I don’t think you really have a leg to stand on. I’m pretty sure crocodiles are illegal to have as pets.

Anyways, Derby and I hit the road and I started to put on my magic act. The one you always made fun of me for practicing. I couldn’t exactly leave him in the van so I found a way to incorporate him. He seemed to enjoy himself. For the final trick, I would pull things out of his mouth. Handkerchiefs tied together. Foam balls. A dove. A lit cigarette. A cascading deck of cards. Your wedding ring. For each item, I would have to reach deeper and deeper into his mouth.

We performed at just about every venue you can imagine; abandoned malls, VFW posts, car dealerships, and even high school gymnasiums. Things were going pretty well until South Carolina. We were working the boardwalk and someone threw a beer can at us. Derby got startled. He snapped down on my hand and wouldn’t let go until everyone was gone. There was nothing I could do but wait. The audience loved it.

Between my ragged nerves and the even more ragged condition of my hand, our magic days were over for a while. We drove on to Tallahassee where we came across a safari themed restaurant. They have a stage for live music on the weekends and in the middle of the dining area, there’s a giant glass cylindar. It’s as big around as our old house and almost as tall. That’s where they keep all the animals. They have everything you can think of, including two crocodiles.

I told them Derby and I needed a place to stay. They took him in and in exchange gave me a job bussing tables and enough money to get set up in a little apartment.

I thought it was a pretty good deal until I saw how they treat the animals. There’s no love here. They’re just commodities. Their care is a task on a list between mopping the floors and changing the fryer oil. And no one stops the patrons or their kids from banging on the glass. On busy nights, it sounds like an army at war running towards another army.

Derby got depressed pretty fast. You remember how sensitive he was. I would have taken him and left, but he wasn’t mine anymore.

I thought it might cheer him up to do our old magic tricks, so one day after closing we put on a private show for the owner. He loved it. He had us perform for the dining room twice a night during the week and open for the musical act on weekends. It was more work than we’d ever had before. I was happy but it took its toll on Derby. He was old and I was pushing him too hard. I always let people push us too hard. It got to the point that Derby didn’t want to perform at all. They had to use those animal-catcher poles and drag him to the stage. He stopped eating. He wasn’t a threat to anyone, anymore. The diners began to lose interest. Then one day, Derby wasn’t there. The owner said he was at the vet getting a check-up.

There’s an orangutan here with an arm that’s been dislocated for so long I’m surprised it hasn’t fallen off. There’s a conspiracy of lemurs, some young, some old. All of them blind. That doesn’t happen on accident. This place doesn’t take animals in for check-ups. Derby was never coming back.

That night, the announcement for our magic act came through the loudspeaker system like normal. I figured it was a mistake and kept bussing tables. The owner came out and found me. He asked what the hell I thought he was paying me for. I didn’t have an answer.

He pointed to the stage where Clint was waiting for me.

Clint is bigger and less patient than Derby, but I still did my act. And I’ve been doing it as scheduled ever since. Clint doesn’t look at me the same way Derby did. He doesn’t enjoy any part of this. He doesn’t want to. He’s a survivor.

There is a pretty good chance that any night could be my last. When I’ve got my head in Clint’s mouth and I’m pretending to look for something, I think about how you always worried that if Derby got out he’d find his way to Bell’s Pond. He would feel at home there and not know why; not know that’s where you and I met. Then one night we would see on the news that a young girl had been attacked while she was swimming. It was a miracle she was still alive. You would pause the screen on her face and look for a resemblance.

They would say it was a crocodile. They wouldn’t use your name but they would call you an irresponsible pet owner. They would say it's your fault the girl got hurt so bad that she’ll never fully recover. And it’s your fault they had to kill Derby. They would say he was a monster and we would watch them pull his body out of the water with a tow truck.

You said, if Derby ever got away, everything from then on would be your fault. And I want you to know it’s not. It’s mine.

Please don’t write back. If you do, they’ll give the letter to Clint and that will be the end of me. I’ll have to go in after it. I won’t be able to stop myself.

x-r-a-y magazine

A THOUSAND WORDS OF BURNING ALIVE by Serrana Laure

October 9, 2019 · Fiction

The rough bark of the pole bit into the tender flesh of her bound wrists, skin fraying against the rope. Her bare feet dangled, numb from the frigid air that gnawed her bones. The wintry sky above glowed, surreal cerulean. She lowered her eyes from the sky and stared into the jostling crowd below. They muttered and seethed. Somewhere, someone laughed. A harsh, short laugh, more like a bark than a giggle. Cameras and phones pointed in her direction. A flash went off and her mind stuttered at the utter insanity. She was being made an example of, she understood this, but the thought that anyone would want a record of it, something to go back to, to show their friends and family, to remind themselves of the event; the thought of this made something in her brain snap. Another flash went off, blinding her.

She had been suspended there overnight, swinging from her own limbs. Her fingers and palms had long since succumbed to numb, but her wrists shrieked, radiating pain up into her arms and shoulders, protesting having been pressed against the hard wood for so long. The cold, and cramping collided in clearly calculated agony, keeping her awake. The pain should have made her disoriented, but instead, she saw the world in high definition. Hawklike, her eyes gravitated toward the unnoticed. She examined the cellular makeup of the air around her. The dust motes hanging in the halfhearted rays of sunlight seeping their way through the clouds, each needle on the pine trees at the edge of the forest, her own blood rushing her life delicately through her body.

The churning crowd hushed, drawing her attention to the man with the flamethrower – a shadow in the shape of a person. The black hole where his face should have been shifted, looking up at her. She tried to empty her brain, prepare herself. The shadow’s machine spurted torrents of orange and crimson, and the wood beneath her feet burst into heat. It felt good at first. The warmth was some small relief to her frozen toes and she was transported, for a moment to a happier time. A time when they had stumbled in from the snow and he had pulled her boots off near the fire and held her frostbitten feet between his warm palms and they had laughed and smiled and everything had been comfort and heat between them. A time when things had been stable and he had been kind. A time when she had trusted him, despite his station. A time before he had divulged her secrets. It had been sensitive information, she had known that, but she had gone against her intuition, convinced herself that his feeling for her was enough to protect her. She had been naive, she knew that now. But the time for epiphanies had passed. As the flames began to claw their way up the pyre and her toes began to thaw, a dull ache pushed in as if in anticipation of the impending torment.

The throbbing from the cold morphed into stinging shocks and she twitched involuntarily as her skin burst into blisters. She bit down on her lips trying to delay the screams she knew were inevitable. And then, with horrifying speed, the stinging thrust into a searing, that shattered into an agony so strong she feared she would explode. The heat radiated from inside her own skin. She gasped and her gasp distorted into a disembodied shriek: inhuman, feral. Even through the pain, she was aware of how disconnected she felt from the sound of her own voice. As though her very being was rending into disparate aspects of itself. She could no longer tell if she was feeling the pain or if it was simply a memory, an echo of suffering. Her whole body flushed as though she had been submerged into a bath of ice water and she screamed again, but this time it was less of a shriek and more of a whimper, and her head slumped and she was silent.

The crowd below scrutinized her through their glowing screens. They were no longer jostling. The silence thickened as her skin and muscle split and fat and blood began to ooze out of her in rivulets of red. The flames crackled and spat with tiny explosions. As they groped higher up her legs, they caught her thin shift, stripping her pale body bare just long enough for everyone to snap a photo before the fire devoured her entirely. Soon, she no longer looked like a person, simply a black hole where something human should have been. A simulacrum of woman. Tar black smoke stretched from the pyre, staining the blue sky with shadow. The crepitating flames ricocheted in dissonance against the particles of the ominously silent winter day. No one in the crowd made a sound.

x-r-a-y magazine

2005 by Tom McAllister

September 30, 2019 · Creative Nonfiction

2005

In February, LauraBeth (then my girlfriend, now my wife) flew to Iowa City to visit me for my birthday. It was colder there than I had ever thought possible—negative thirty degrees, factoring in wind chill. The kind of cold that would kill a Martian. The college students still went out at night in short skirts and t-shirts, because they didn’t want their jackets to smell like smoke. These two years in Iowa City were the last time in my life when I would know what it felt like to sit in a bar with dozens of smokers, lit cigarettes glowing like alligators’ eyes in the dark, smoke snaking its way into my lungs and my hair and my clothing forever.

I didn’t have to pay for utilities in my apartment, so I set the thermostat to 80 and we quarantined ourselves in the greenhouse heat. My mom had mailed me a care package that included authentic cheesesteaks, Tastykakes, and a birthday banner, which we hung above the couch. We ate chicken parm and an ice cream cake, and we watched the NBA All-Star skills competition on the new TV she had bought me that morning. We’d driven together to Best Buy to pick up a 27-inch flat screen, replacing the one I’d owned since I was 15. This was now the fanciest TV I had ever owned, though it was still a monstrous tube model so big didn’t fit in my hatchback. We removed it from the box at the store, crammed into the trunk, and drove home with hazard lights flashing and the rear windshield flapping in the wind like a ridiculous mouth laughing at us the whole way. I lived on the second floor, and carrying that TV up a narrow, winding flight of stairs was the most physically demanding thing I did in all of 2005. I preferred watching sports to engaging in them. I was gaining weight again rapidly, and people kept saying things like, “You’ve really filled out,” which is only meant as a compliment when you say it to toddlers or rescue dogs.

Sports have always been a central fact of my life, but never more so than my two years in Iowa City—they were the one thing that helped me still feel connected to home when I was alone in my apartment and feeling like a failure as a writer and a teacher— and so I was as invested in the dunk contest as anyone in the country that night. This is the point where, if I’ve had a few drinks and a somewhat willing audience, I would spend the next hour demanding justice for Andre Iguodala, who was robbed of the dunk contest title that year. This is also where I would complain about Nate Robinson getting unlimited attempts to hit his final dunk. But I’m trying to get better about that kind of thing. I realize nobody cares.

LauraBeth grew up with two athletic and ultra-competitive brothers, and through a combination of genetics, conditioning, and sheer force of will, she now harbors an antipathy to competition that is healthier than my worldview but is, frankly, a little unnerving. She played field hockey in high school, but never felt any particular drive to win. She will not play board games or engage in other competitions with the rest of the family because of how much she hated all of it when she was young. She watches sports with me, but can’t help feeling badly for the losing team after the final whistle (even if it’s a team we all justifiably hate, like the Dallas Cowboys). She asks me to change the channel so we can look away from their sagging shoulders and heartbroken faces; she sees them not as enemies, but as young men, some young enough they can’t even legally drink, enduring one of the worst moments of their lives. Though this is not remotely how I live or think, I understand it to be an admirable trait. All of which is to say, exhibition sports are the ideal environment for her. The guys in the dunk contest, like every pro athlete, are pathologically competitive, but they are just having fun and there are no real consequences for losing.

I want to clarify something: dunks matter more than you think they do. You may want to tell me it’s all a big dumb spectacle and the scoring doesn’t make sense, and it’s just a show to sell Sprite and sneakers, and yes, sure, that’s what it is. But strip all the nonsense away and you see an aesthetic achievement that can only be performed by a tiny percentage of humans in world history. Each dunk is one of the most perfect sporting achievements on the planet, a beautiful expression of athletic perfection, of power, speed, and creativity. These players—their bodies built specifically for this feat, spinning in the god damn air, not just floating because there’s violence propelling it, and throwing it down behind their heads with more grace and fluidity in the coordination than many dancers—are the culmination of a century worth of training, learning, and evolutionary adaptations. Major sports leagues should take themselves less seriously anyway. What’s more ridiculous than watching a group of NFL men in a TV studio, wearing suits and standing on a fake field while they shout about honor and duty? It’s one of the worst aspects of our culture. Events like the dunk contest puncture the veneer of self-importance that covers every major league. They remind people that this is dumb and the dumbness is what makes it fun.

A couple years after I moved back to the east coast and we bought a house and got married, we finally bought another new TV, upgrading to HD, which helped us more clearly see the anguish on the faces of the losing teams. The TV she got me for my 23rd birthday was transferred to the attic, and then when we moved again it went to the basement of the new house, and, finally, we hauled it out to the curb, where it sat for a week before I learned that this is not how you dispose of a TV anymore (on any given day in the suburbs, sidewalks are dotted with hulking tube TVs like meteors crashed to earth). I could have left it on the curb for years. Eventually I would drag some old furniture out there and that would stay too and soon our whole living room could be on the sidewalk, a mirror of the lives we tried to hide inside.

Because our house is full of toxic materials the township won’t collect, we drove one afternoon with a trunk full of paint cans, dangerous solvents, and batteries, to the landfill in Pennsauken, New Jersey. I wrote a research paper on landfills in high school biology, but I don’t get the science behind them, whether there is anything more to it than digging a giant hole and filling it with garbage until the earth is too full and then you move down the road to a new hole. Once it’s out of my sight, I trust that it is someone else’s problem. All this stuff was alive once and you expect it to smell like death, but it smells like nothing (the landfill itself has a 5-star rating on Google, with the top review stating, “It don’t even smell”). We dropped our trash in the appropriate areas, ending at a walk-in dumpster, a container for obsolete electronics. Inside, piled floor to ceiling, were TVs and computer monitors. The foundation of these stacks was several vintage console TVs, each of which I imagined having been passed down through their families they became too unwieldy to move anymore. Maybe they trundled through thrift stores and flea markets, through the homes of various well-meaning people planning to fix them up and turn them into a cool showpiece in their art school loft, but eventually they were hauled to this spot.

Being in the center of a county dump is humbling and a little upsetting. It is a reminder that even if, like me, you think of yourself as being a minimalist, most people are surrounded by garbage. It’s all disposable and you’re disposable too. It’s all replaceable and you’re replaceable too. In 2005, this TV was the center of my world, and now it would be piled, for the rest of the life of the planet, in this dumpster in Pennsauken. It would outlive me by a million years, and that whole time it would be utterly useless, just plastic and wires, there forever.

x-r-a-y magazine

GALVESTON, TEXAS by Alex Weidman

September 29, 2019 · Fiction

This Texas night is similar to a Mexico night. Both are deeply oppressive, deeply black and unyielding, lunar in no real sense, unless one is thinking about the dark side of the moon and, really, only the appearance of the dark side of the moon. Outside the car windows it is absolutely unchanging.

It is not like an El Salvador night Javier thinks. El Salvador nights are fertile and alive, and similar to Guatemalan nights and similar, up to a point, to very southern Mexico nights. They are deeply alive, which Javier knows to mean they are deeply human, which really means that the will of life seems to radiate up from the ground itself and hang in the air like humidity.

Nothing promising seems to radiate up from the blackness outside.

Javier had been warned not to hitchhike after he crossed. Hitchhiking they said was a sure way to get yourself killed. But Javier had been lead so far astray that it would have been fatal trying to get back east any other way. He’d known something was very wrong when the land around them had turned into the desert, so it was either hitchhike and die or don’t hitchhike and die. So Javier hitchhiked and got unbelievably lucky.

For hundreds of miles through the Texas night it would be just him, this stranger who picked him up, the small, repressed section of highway visible in the headlights, and the border, sometimes no more than fifty yards away. All through the night they’d pass white trucks driving back and forth along a patrol road that paralleled the highway, driven by seemingly no one, or by men in black masks and black sunglasses despite it being the middle of the night. Javier would begin to form an understanding of the relationship between this land and extraterrestrial sightings. The mind can only do what it can with the strangeness of this place. It must put together a coherent picture.

Driving through the deep night Javier would not know that when he arrives in Galveston he’d go directly to the beach. He’d go directly to the beach like some sort of pilgrim drawn naturally to an edge. On the beach Javier would take refuge under the pier, where above he could hear laughing children and the sounds of carnival games. He would almost swear he could hear the exhaustion of the parents who were shepherding the kids around. Javier would not understand why someone would come to the beach in January, in this weather. To him it’d seem miserable.

Sitting next to this silent stranger Javier would also not know that when he arrives in Galveston his cousin would no longer answer his phone. Anyone even remotely paying attention would know that things had been getting very dangerous, and Javier’s cousin would end up backing out, leaving Javier stranded without so much as an address.

Javier would end up wandering Galveston, a beach town that seems to absorb nothing of the vitality of the tourists and vacationers who come there (though if one paid any attention they’d realize that these tourists aren’t the picture of vitality either, but more like wanderers as well, people mostly lost who only by chance happened to have stumbled upon something familiar to what they think they’d been looking for). Instead the town will grow increasingly tired, like the maids and waitresses and cooks who are ubiquitous in service economies. Javier would end up wandering endlessly through this town that seems to grow emptier and more desolate, as if the people were turning into cardboard cutouts, as if it is a border town in the truest sense, a town that is set up only as a façade of a town, likely for official use.

Driving through the Texas night Javier does not know about his wandering. Instead he thinks about Luisa del Rosa, who he’d already decided he’d never see again. He thinks about Luisa and about the future and her absence, and the inability to reconcile completely the disappearance of a person from one’s life, which is also a way of being unable to reconcile the disappearance of one’s self from any reference point. Eventually in Galveston Javier will fall asleep on the beach, under the pier, where he’ll dream of Luisa. He’ll dream Luisa is with him, that they are together under that pier, and he’ll dream that despite his cousin not answering his phone and despite having nowhere to go and having no money and despite being technically pursued, everything is okay. Everything is okay because Luisa is there, and Luisa being there suggests something about being a teenager still and something peaceful, something similar in the sound of the waves that will rock Javier to sleep again and again for days that’ll end up being innumerable.

x-r-a-y magazine

HOLES IN THE STOMACH PROVIDE WINDOWS INTO DIGESTION by Kate Lohnes

September 27, 2019 · Creative Nonfiction

Picture me a babe no words throated there has to be context. Like pigtails at Brookfield Zoo, once I lost my mother, all greeneyed bulbous, looking window through at tiger sleeping on riverbank, sketchers and ratted jacket rattled I was child then, was child once. Not here temporally isolated at this locus where you touch me [touch me touchme pleasetouchme]. Carbonbodies grow in time with nutrients so I ate once, you know, thick chilled carrot mush and chicken tenders but that mole I have here has always marked me cain.

Under canopic and dense Dublin smoke settles on pores and clots them. Tell me I’m being dramatic. So pathetic lass. Lonely lass ununique, the river says. I say river in hellfire Cassandra burns and burns with Ajax. And river he still touches her. [7 year re cycle skin cycle reskincycle it hasn’t been that long yet]. So yeah she feels him and I’ll whine when I want to because always are we performative. You know this. Darling I told you of A. St Martin. His body burned through by bulletrip, hole stomach gaping so why not keep it open. Why not tie meat to string and dangle dip like candlemaker in gastric juice mmmmm let us see what it means digest.

And that’s actually what happened do you get that alive with hole gaping. Alive with hole gaping and writhing doctor poked St Martin living trial belly bright under operation light, he never sewed body up. Even though he promised. Do you get that. Dipdipdrip meat let bacteria break down flesh inside bulletbrokenbody. It was education. Like when Erasistratus strapped men [slavebody he justified] living in auditorium cut larynx first to silence screams. Carved one throughline from genitals to throat opened spread eagle said look here look at heart beating living bodywrithing but heart heart heart thumpthump dyedha dyedha dyedha. Men died soon after. Thick cut unscreaming but shook violent on restraints. The people of auditorium took notes vigorously. So yeah it was a window and only a window.

You have to understand. I was a child once unperforated. Body unlicked by flame, gastric juices unbubbling unmeattouched. There was a time when heart beat first so why not keep it open and see. I used to eat, digest, used to burn and swoon let fire touch me like Ajax, oh yes, just like Ajax. So there is context, you see, a throughline connective between who I was and the woman standing here, in front of you, Liffey at my left and your eyes so angry. Sunk and blue and angry, like river entered them reflecting shards of promised morning in the worst way. Me my eyes green no river. Everseparate, everclinging to somewhere between the rapture you know then god mountainside said kill for me. Me marked I had no choice prophecy is not one to bargain.

But you know this. You know this part of the story. How one night eveslicked after swallowing serpent I folded myself into the felt hills of western Ireland. You know the sheep bleating mimicked fjord ruthlessly like when she spoke to us and it was not soft. Body wet with rain troyfire fading I had way too much gin and I liked it. And yeah evil maybe. But I was not A. St Martin no juices to play with no liquid left. So how could I tell you of twenty years between here and my beginnings and have it seem like anything other than performance through tinted window.

Instead just picture me a babe body still slicked viscous with heaven’s syrup and pretend momentarily that time has always been linear.

x-r-a-y magazine

BUGS by Zac Smith

September 22, 2019 · Fiction

Every day I went outside to find new bugs. I found bugs on the ground. I found bugs on the street. I found bugs in the garbage. I found bugs on a dead skunk on the road. I found bugs writhing around the inside of a tree that had split in half during a windstorm, in the middle of the night there was this incredible cracking sound, like thunder, but there was no rain, it was just the tree snapping in half and then it crashed onto the ground. The inside of it was a network of narrow passages and wavy, warped wood, all the way through, like a tall, dense sponge. I imagined that it had been filled with bugs for weeks, maybe months, maybe over a year, the bugs slowly burrowing through it, setting up colonies—a colony of ants, a colony of beetles, a colony of wasps, a colony of aphids, a colony of termites—and moving around, digging into the wood, boring holes in the bark, scooping out the wood and replacing it with mush and larvae and piles of their own dead. And finally the windstorm came and it was enough to bend the tree so much that it buckled under the weight of itself, the bugs only having colonized so far high so that the bulk of the rot and hollowed-out wood was near the bottom, right at head height, so the rest of the top of the tree with all of its branches just got too heavy, the wind pushed it and that was it. The bugs were still writhing around inside. I could see the chambers they had eaten out of it in profile. I could see the bugs that had been split in half when the tree buckled, their sticky, mangled bodies lay smeared onto the tops of the serrated striations of the inside of the tree. It was like they were crawling around inside the mouth of some terrible monster that had rows and rows and blunt, wooden teeth and finally it snapped shut to eat them. Most of the ants that had been split in half were still twitching, and all the other ants ignored them. The ants that were split in half were still mostly alive, just like the tree—split in half but still alive. They must have been like that, split in half and twitching, for hours, since the tree had snapped. And I saw the chamber with the queen in it and all the larvae she had produced, piles of terrible little half-bodies in the hollowed-out nooks of the tree, and a beetle was also in the chamber, picking up the larvae and snapping them in half and eating them, and there were ants trying to tug at its legs and the legs of the other beetle that was crawling into the chamber, now that it was all exposed and open. I could just reach in and grab all of them, the queen ant, the larvae, the beetles, the ants tugging at their legs, scoop it all out in one hand. I thought about the time I was a little kid in my grandparent's backyard in California and I was sent out to clean up the overripe avocados all over the ground under the trees while my grandparents cooked dinner for everyone. My parents were coming to pick me up after the three weeks I had stayed there, and we were going to have a big dinner in the backyard and my grandparents didn't want anyone stepping on a mushy avocado. I picked up maybe twenty or thirty and threw them one by one over the fence and into the easement that butted up against the concrete drainage area, and sometimes I threw them hard enough so that they cleared the easement and I could hear them puck wetly onto the concrete. I picked up a small, leathery one from near the compost bin that was squishier than all the others and when I squeezed it, the skin split and bloomed open and a wad of maybe thirty red wrigglers poured out, I felt them pinch and squeeze between my fingers and gush out a hoary, stinking juice into my hand and down my wrist and arm. I threw the mass toward the fence, brown gunk and dripping, writhing worms exploding in the air like a plume, or spray, before smacking against the wood, the pit thumping dully, worms clinging wetly to the pine boards and then flopping down onto the grass. My hand smelled like the worm juice the entire dinner, night, and subsequent two-day car trip home, I would wash my hands, scrape bars of soap with my fingernails and let the soap stay there, then later soak my hand in hot, soapy water, but nothing helped, nothing got rid of the smell, every time I scratched my face or picked my nose or rubbed my eyes, I would smell it, the same sick, fetid smell of bile and rot. That was what I thought of when I saw the beetles and the larvae in the tree, I tried to conjure up the smell of it, but I couldn't remember exactly how it smelled anymore, all I could smell was pine sap, tacky and raw—some of the ants were stuck in the hardening sap, wiggling their antennae and mandibles in little tiny death throes. So I did, I put my hand in, scooped out as much as I could, the ants, the larvae, the beetles, the sap, the splinters. I felt it all as a mass, squeezed it, felt it gush and congeal, felt the beetles crawl out onto my hand through the mangled everything else. There are bugs everywhere. Everywhere there are bugs. It’s better if you go looking for them. It’s better if you go looking for them and find them first and know what will come when you squeeze.

Then you can squeeze.

x-r-a-y magazine

THE TRUTH IN SOMETHING BLUE, AN ART LECTURE AT THE AUCTION HALL WITH MEDIEVAL ART SCHOLAR MARC LAFERNE ON THE R___BERG “MARIAN” IMAGE by Erika Franz

September 20, 2019 · Fiction

The picture tells the entire story of the court B___, Duchess of R___berg. It’s a strange language, though—the economics of color in the late medieval era, the templates of the religious, the indifference to women in love, and the varying devotion to the differing mores of Christianity, framed for you in Gothic arches.

Most of you carry around a mere caricature of the medieval world. You assume Puritanical prudery—but the Puritans belong to a later age.

So, to the picture, once tucked into a niche at the convent at R___berg. Surely, this is a religious devotional.

Here is surely Mary, Mother of God—after all, is she not dressed in her signature ultramarine, the stunning blue of ground lapis lazuli that was brought from far Afghanistan? At the time, this color was worth its weight in gold and often reserved for the Virgin on this very account.

Here, surely, is her dear cousin Elizabeth. See, how she wraps her arms around the Virgin? How intimate. And these two small babes playing in the grass at the Virgin’s feet must be the Baptist and the Christ. Surely. Here, even, is a bucolic spring to foreshadow the Baptism.

The Duchess of R___berg was herself thought to be a virgin. Her parents arranged her marriage to a younger brother of a wealthy family before they died. She was famously described demanding abstinence of her husband on their wedding night.

Of course, these tales come from the sources out of the same convent in which we found the painting, where she was well-loved and to which she was quite generous. Her confessor, shepherd of the convent’s flock of nuns, attested in his little old-fashioned Vita to her many virtues, including holy virginity.

It is rather a different story from across the river. There you find a monastery, at other times tied quite closely to the convent. At the time of this tale, however, there has been a sundering between the two religious houses by the secular intrusion of the Duke of M__, also known as the Stag of M__, who acquired lands west of the river at the Duchess’s expense and had designs, yet, on R___berg itself.

Given his ample support of the monks in the Benedictine house on the west bank, perhaps it was merely political support for their benefactor that led them to vilify the Duchess of R___berg as a Sapphic, who spurned her sacramental marriage. It was quite possibly this allegiance which prompted them to name him the Stag, which in Christendom was the killer of snakes, defeater of evil, and often a stand-in for Christ, himself.

Or perhaps both versions of the story are correct depending upon your point of view. After all the monk who does the vilifying really cares less that she is a Sapphic and more that she refuses to consummate the marriage as a good wife should. Medieval men were generally unthreatened by the bumping of shields—only another’s sword thrust could cuckold him. Her husband, apparently found his fill piercing other shields than his wife’s, and was relatively unconcerned by these monastic aspersions.

A Lady G___ was the woman accused by the monk of being the duchess’s distraction from her marital duties. A widow, she was known to have raised two children in the Duchess’s court, and when the Duchess’s husband died, the eldest of these two was named her heir.

Let us return, then, to the painting. So here we have a virgin in the arms of another woman, two children playing at their feet. A virgin, but perhaps not the Virgin. Elizabeth and Mary are not described in the New Testament as having met after the birth of their children. Biblically, John the Baptist first appears leaping in Elizabeth’s womb at his divine cousin’s in utero arrival via the Virgin Mary. The lads don’t meet again until the river Baptism, shortly before John’s beheading for Salome at Herod’s court.

And here, across the stream from the happy family, we see the small stag. Is he there to defend the holy family against evil? Or he is the Duke of M__ relegated to the corner and his holdings west of the river; in the foreground, but minimized in the narrative in that way that Medieval artists could do so well. The Duke of M__ never got R___berg.

So, what have we then? Perhaps two women, lovers, hiding in plain sight behind the religious iconography of the day, painted by an anonymous nun. The very wealth of the virgin’s robe providing plausible deniability. A touching family scene eventually enshrined safely in a convent, away from the eyes of men.

x-r-a-y magazine

ONLY THE FRUIT BEARING TREES by Kate Gehan

September 19, 2019 · Fiction

The morning after a stormy night spent hiding in a windowless room while sirens announced a green sky, Nichole discovers the last plum tree has fallen on the soggy side of the house. She runs her palm along the fungus scaling the trunk and plucks at the earnest flower petals. At the bottom of the yard trapped against the fence, a large red bouncy ball swivels and shudders in a puddle. The taut plastic reveals a phone number written in black marker along with a smudged word beginning with a T. Nichole drops the petals into the grass and sends a text.

She watches a goldfinch land on the fallen tree until her phone chirps.

You found me

Trish? Talia?

Neither

Tom? Tony?

Time

The wind picks up and take the goldfinch with it.

I have your ball

Yes and you have time

Time for what?

Whatever you want

Nichole thinks this is some bullshit.

Do you want it back

Up to you

Some mom sharpied the return info on her kid’s ball and now the dad was is having fun with Nichole because his life has become a perpetual Wednesday. She prays to the bird, which now watches her from its perch a few fence panels away, that the dad won’t send a picture.

FFS just give me your address

Baby, let’s take it slow

From the putrid swamp of her yard Nichole considers the last of her fruit bearing trees, as it dangles its roots suggestively.

+++

Twelve trees flocked the property when Nichole and Ted bought the house. Their first loss was the gum—split in half by the wind. Nichole still unexpectedly weeps when she registers the reason for the abrasive light in the living room on fall afternoons. The spring Nichole miscarried the third time, the sour cherry and pear trees drowned in the soupy earth. The men who come to take everything away promptly sliced them up and shoved them into the wood chipper. How many trees were left now? She deliberately refused to count, in the same way she refused to compute a year in the future at which point she would reasonably be dead herself. Ted called it willful ignorance without understanding her means of survival.

Nichole had become defensive about the trees as the years passed and she failed to keep important things alive. A few days after another loss, she had shouted at a neighbor during a fire pit backyard hangout that her ash tree was not infested with the invasive emerald borer beetle. When someone muttered Nichole needed to face reality and cut it down to save the expense, she explained that at great cost the tree doctors were preemptively treating it. And then she turned her hot cheeks away from the fire towards the man who lived at the end of the cul de sac who was identifying constellations with an app. He told his small son all the clusters were not visible because of light pollution. Nichole had no interest in what she couldn’t see or how their little fire, their town, everything around them, was perpetually tilting away. She thought mostly about developing additional healing rituals, like positive energy chants to encourage growth while she massaged the soft new tips of her fir branches, or focused meditation in twenty-minute increments while she wrapped her body against the sticky trunks. Ted wasn’t bothered by the loss of speechless organisms but she did not believe in replacements. Nichole didn’t want to plant anything new—she wanted to save what was already there.

+++

She puts her hand on the hot red plastic ball, testing its pressure. The men always come after storms and soon a pickup truck hauling a wood chipper rumbles along, its wheels scraping the curb. Damage cleanup, damage erasure.

“Hey,” a bearded dude jumps out. “I can clear that away for you right now. Sixty bucks.”

She texts again.

Maybe I want to keep it

Take what you want baby

What I want is everything

Nichole wants a repair man, a man to reassemble the plum tree, to glue it back together, wrap bandages around its weaknesses. She wants firm, gentle fingers to caress the hurt parts, pet the tiny leaves, whisper to the petals words of encouragement to flourish, to turn towards the sun.

Cigarette in hand, the tree guy stares at her, chin up, his question still floating between them, a promise, a threat, an invitation.

x-r-a-y magazine

GARDEN TOOLS by Amie Norman Walker

September 17, 2019 · Fiction

I crunch numbers on my Excel sheet and pause to reflect upon the decency of the dirt beneath my fingernails. I dug in my garden all weekend, pulled up weeds, ground plants, and potted them. Back inside my office, I question if gardener was the correct occupation for my soul to hang from. Using a business card, I carve the dirt from my crevasses over my one-lined to-do list. I was tasked with contacting the new business partner’s accountant by a woman who sat through the recent meeting with no contribution other than to nod and smile at the two men who promised through baritone voices the new partnership would revitalize customer satisfaction. Reviewing the delegated functions, one commanded, “Cher, give her Benjamin’s number.” She sang back, “Oh yes, absolutely,” with certain ease.

Posing weaponry against cubicle small talk, I don a gaudy headset to call Benjamin. His brisk answer upon the first ring and the stern tone in his introduction suggest I cut to the chase.

“Hi. I’m to retrieve the documentation I need from you before we can process your checks.” Through the distinct sound of water smacking against the already over-watered soil of a house plant and over the crinkle of papers shuffling, Benjamin's voice shifts into rushed apology. “I’m sorry, honey. You know they told me you would call. I thought they’d explain to you there is no reason for this at all. Who was with you? With you in that meeting? Was it Cher?” I explain that Cher was there and gave me the number under the direction of two distinguished men. He put me on hold after saying, “Excuse me, just a minute.”

While waiting with patience, several people pass my office. Two attempt to enter, see my headset on, put a finger up, as if they were genius, and mouth I'll catch you later. I flip my calendar from May to June. Suddenly, Benjamin is back with raised voice. “I’ll need to see you soon.”

I’m unsure if he is speaking to me or someone else in the room. “Excuse me?”

He explains his firm does not send any legal documents via email, fax, or mail, absolutely no way, so I’ll have to pick up the document in person. I confirm that is no problem at all; a mileage check will be cut from my own company. We set a date for the fifth of June, and he sang goodbye to me with a pleasant tune.

I pull up to the office of Brooks and Dune at quarter past noon. Befitting her character, Cher is poised in the window eating butter biscuits and smoking a cigarette. Benjamin’s name plate is the only one in gold font near a variety of buttons indicating which section of the building the offices are in. I press the buzzer, and the click of unlocking mechanisms invites my hand to the brass handle. Pleased I do not have to wait for Cher’s return from lunch for entry, I step into a long atrium with cemented sidewalk, windows, and foliage from ceiling to floor, nauseating and hot, like a birdhouse in a mid-western zoo.

I follow the sidewalk to the next set of doors that do not have a buzzer or lock; it’s the type of door you had to question whether to push through or knock. I find Benjamin’s name on another boldfaced gold plaque. Momentarily pausing between my knocks, I turn my ear toward the seam to pick up any respondents noise; first I hear nothing, not even a breeze, just the hum of a distant air conditioner and birds in the sun. Mid through my third round of two tap raps comes the sound of an impatient man, who briskly presses back his chair as he demands, “Come in.”

Inside, I find two parrots and a lizard in bird cages hanging from the ceiling directly to my right. To my left is a table over which two men play an intense chess game. I debate with myself: did the glassed hallway perform time travel to the future or the past? Rushing to stand, approach, and reach for a shake, is first Benjamin, whose grip is quick and brisk. He pulls up a chair for me. “Come girl, sit down,” Benjamin demands of me. “Don’t you know we’re on lunch until three?” I ask if I should come back, and he insists no while introducing his brother. Paul’s eyes are deep blue, concerned and slanted, as if fixed permanently in concentration, giving the impression he’s thinking about the handshake we’re having right now. His hand is soft and polite, cold at the fingertips and warm in the palm. Our grip remains entwined as we all sit in the same breath that Benjamin uses to express his discontent; I’ve interrupted their game.

A certain type of money buys special bulbs to light a room to imitate the sun. The atrium was top-to- bottom windows, while this room has but one with its curtain black, pulled shut, and dust around the edges, suggesting the tenure of its position. The room is lined with houseplant and on hanging shelves and atop each flat surface in sight except the chess table and chairs.

Without a word or explanation, Benjamin and Paul resume their game of chess. After several moves of what appear to gain nothing, Benjamin says, “Brooks and Dune owns this building. Aren’t you impressed, sweetie?” I look at Paul and back at Benjamin, bite my lip, and say, “Sure. The grounds are lovely as far as I can see.” While they continue their game, I wonder if I should ask where the documentation are, if maybe someone else, an assistant like Cher, could retrieve them for me. Just then, Benjamin starts to question me.

“Do you remember the company who paid for this service before Brooks and Dune?”

“No, I’ve only worked here for two years.”

“Do you know the by-laws?”

“No, above my pay grade, I suppose.”

“Stunning,” says Paul.

They continue their game, not minding me at all. I cough ahem, and Benjamin shrugs. “Dear, we’re going out on the boat later. We hope you’ll accept our offer to be a barmaid. Be certain you’ll be justly paid.”

Paul peels blatant disgust off in his loud sigh, exclaiming, “Oh, just give up the charade! Bennie, the girl clearly has no clue!”

My mouth opens slightly, my head askew.

“Girl," Paul says, placing a watering can in my hand and gesturing toward the adjacent wall of plants. "I have something to offer you. Be careful not to miss. You look confused. First, let’s have a drink. Sit back down here, and we’ll go over the whole stink.”

Benjamin explains, while Paul runs his hand up and down my leg and stares at me with the softest look of horny I’ve ever seen on a man that large. “Dear, we’ve been watching you, not you particularly, but your now former employer, the one who sent you here, for some time. We’re running the undercover operation pinning the formulation of human trafficking rings on Senator Briggs. Paul seemed to think you had no idea and wanted to spare you anyway he could. In order to do so, we had to keep on with the game until we could get you here to sign your clause of employment over to us. We’re doing you a favor.”

Paul’s hand slides up my skirt. I count ten seconds in reverse and notice next to Benjamin’s chair a bucket with gardening tools. Smelling the sweet foliage in the clammy air, the soil's deep moisture, and the weeping whisk of petals under the central fans crisp air, I am inspired. I pick up the shears and, in my most even tone, say, “Please. I’d love to pour a cocktail, but I have to prune on my own. I’ll take up your job offer in exchange for a business card with the title gardener and freedom to roam.” Paul stands with grace to catch me, as Benjamin's box knife nicks my neck bone.

x-r-a-y magazine

WRESTLEGY by Timothy Parfitt

September 15, 2019 · Creative Nonfiction

We met under the spotlights, cast as Macduff and Banquo in our high school’s production of Macbeth. Alex and I became fast friends. We goofed around a lot back stage, smoked a little weed in the alley. My big moment was when I got to run onstage and yell “horror” until the word lost meaning. When the production was over, Alex invited me to join him and his other upperclassman friends in their backyard wrestling league. Boys playing dress up, immortalizing our daring feats on a bulky 90s camcorder. I played a janitor in coveralls and wielded a mop. We fell on each other from great heights, a mattress or trampoline underneath us. If you do it right, it’s a kind of embrace.

Dark Arena. Ring stands empty.

Into the light dances a myth,

purple feathered boa wrapped around torso.

Pink boots a stompin’.

Larry Sweeney barrels down the aisle

and dives between the ropes of the ring,

bounces to his feet, taunts the crowd,

delights in their jeers, flexes, preens.

His shoulder-length bleach blond hair is wet,

droplets rain with every whip of his head.

We stayed friends but never became close ones, even after I followed Alex to the same Midwestern college. After graduating, Alex moved to Pennsylvania to train with Ring of Honor. That’s where he created Larry Sweeney. I followed his career from afar, got Facebook invites to his matches when he was in town. He doggedly pursued his art, something I admired and even envied. Mine was an idealized notion of Alex. I only heard about the rest later, after he killed himself. Barthes said “In wrestling, a man down is exaggeratedly so, filling the spectators’ entire field of vision with the intolerable spectacle of his powerlessness.” Alex lived to put on a show, so to mourn him, so will I. Good taste is never of paramount importance, least not in wrestling. Book an arena of the mind. Reanimate the dead. Print fliers. Spread the word: a rematch.

Good evening!

What a treat we have in store for you tonight.

Re-birth, Re-venge. The Re-turn…of

Sweet ’n‘ Sour Larry Sweeney!

Close up of Sweeney’s face in pain.

He takes his pink aviators off.

Then puts them back on.

More, More, More demands Larry’s theme music.

When a friend kills themselves, there is no ref to whom to appeal. I read online that Larry hanged himself from the turnbuckle of a ring in Louisiana, that it was his parents who found him. “Unnatural” is a word people use when parents bury their children. Kayfabe is the concept in wrestling that the shared fantasy created in the ring is a code and that the characters and stories created in the ring are sacred. Reality outside the ring, once acknowledged, betrays the fantasy created within it. To “break” kayfabe is wrestling’s greatest sin.

Venue change: Starbucks.

Behold Alex, gravel-voiced bipolar disturbance.

He delivers a kick! to the plate glass window

then stays to kick and kick

until the shatterproof glass comes down.

Stays long after

the baristas call the police.

Rematch implies the possibility of changed outcome. Alex is gone but some version of him (Larry?) kicks around my head. I hate movie suicides, the sad minimalist piano music, the familiar storm clouds and pockets full of stones. I watch dedications online, teary bloggers recount what they all agree was his low point.

Toyota Center Parking Lot:

Shaky camera work,

an opponent named the UK Viper.

Fans getting a chance to mix it up

with a fallen star.

Alex is a manic

and good-natured ringleader.

Tractor trailers in the background.

Halfway between Alex and Larry,

switching back and forth.

When the amateur announcer calls him Larry,

he stops him, and speaks of the name his parents gave him.

I track down and speak to a man who shot the video, who documented what others describe as the zenith of Alex’s unchecked mania. Aaron was a kid skipping school when he met Larry in a McDonalds down the street from the arena. Over the course of that afternoon, Alex became something like a mentor to him. Aaron was the “promoter” of that improvised parking lot match witnessed by a dedicated handful. No one had believed in him like that before. Before what I saw in the video was a tragedy, a fallen star vamping for attention and beer money. After talking to Aaron, I remember Alex could be plain fun. So many known and recorded versions of Alex: artist, friend, inspiration, danger to himself and others, suicide.

Crackling audio of Alex discussing

the awakening that sealed his departure

from Ring of Honor:

“The sky parted ways.

They opened up.

I don’t know how else to describe it, man.

It was like God

staring directly into me

and through me and

I was looking back at him.”

In his own words, 2009, the year of the parking lot match, was the worst of his life. A qualifier though, when he speaks of it, one that haunts me. He calls it the “worst event of my life, up to this point.” “Up to this point” is probably just Alex being realistic, life is a series of hurdles, but to me it sounds expectant. I track down Aine, one of the witches from Macbeth. They never dated-dated, but he was her first kiss. Back then I thought he walked on water, she says. She tells me of the time Alex drove halfway across the country based on a message he heard within the “Jesus Christ Superstar” soundtrack. How far do the dead plan ahead? He would have done big things in the big leagues.

Sweeney kicks a tombstone into an open grave,

then begins to shovel.

Breaks free, jumps upon the turnbuckle,

makes the international gesture for suck it.

Fireworks punctuate the gesture.

From my spot on the mat,

I regard the figure on top of me,

monster stitched together from Youtube,

memory and daydream.

Surely this is not Larry, much less Alex.

Once he was gone, Alex became a sinking feeling. Instead of making sense of his death, I wallowed in the messiness of it, got lost in the versions of him that live online. Dying in the ring made him myth. Reanimating him has done little to make the spectacle of his death tolerable. My imagination has failed me.

A flicker passes across his eyes,

recognition perhaps,

or resignation.

He jumps, sends his feet

out in front of him, cocks his elbow,

his hair streaking in the wind.

It’s a very interesting question,

though only one person who can answer it.

The man under that big black hat.

Credits roll, time marches on.

Tune in next time.

Larry elbow drops into the ether.

I remember his bark of a laugh. Put the various versions of him away. I’ve been grappling with him so long fantasy has dried into memory. What a poor promoter I was. None vanquished, no new storylines to pursue. If anyone real were involved were my checks would have bounced. I miss Alex. I close the browser windows.

x-r-a-y magazine

« Previous 1…63 646566 67…90 Next »